What a Season of Love Can Do
by SonaCeol
Summary: A legacy can be formed in a few moments, but can last a lifetime. This is Rydia's legacy from her mother and the one she hopes to pass down to her own children.


**Disclaimer: I do not own any characters presented in this fictional work, nor do I intend any copyright infringement upon Square Enix. I am also not in any way affiliated with anything having to do with Final Fantasy IV. **

**What a Season of Love Can Do**

Rydia's mother had been an amateur gardener in her lifetime. That is always the first thing that comes to Rydia's mind when she thinks about her. While she had kept a small kitchen with vegetables, fruits, herbs, and other plants that she felt she could use in some way or another, Rydia's mother loved working in the flower patch in the front of the house.

Rydia always likened herself to the plants her mother grew. In her child's mind, there was barely any difference, especially when she compared her grass-green hair and eyes to that of her mother's flowers. But there was no jealousy present in Rydia's heart about however much time her mother spent with her flowers, because if her mother was toying in her flower beds, Rydia was right there with her, weeding and spading and laughing with her mother. Looking back, Rydia thinks those were the best times in her life.

Plants were always what Rydia had loved most about the World Above, as she had come to call it in her mind. Everything was a growing green. There wasn't much green in the Underworld, unless you counted the toxic-looking green of the grounds of some of the cave systems she had explored. Rydia learned very quickly what that green meant. It was the green of sickness, a slow poison seeping through the body, pervading and permeating everything until a person eventually succumbed to the weakness it inflicted. It was best to travel the Underworld cave systems with at least one partner, if not a group. Fighting monsters was one thing when somebody was healthy. Rydia found it nearly impossible to challenge the monsters after slogging across the floor. The only way around the poison was to cast Float, and Queen Asura hadn't gotten around to teaching her the higher levels of magical spells, saying to leave them until she was a bit older.

No, Rydia's favorite color was the green of growing, breathing, _alive_ plants. So, after the final battle, after everyone had returned to their home countries and settled in to their new lives, Rydia returned to Mist. After all the initial reconstruction had happened, though, and Rydia had settled nicely into her old/new house, she began to feel restless. Something was still missing. She mulled it over for days while a sense of deja vu overtook her. She knew in the back of her mind what she had to do.

One night, she was sleeping deeply, on the edge of dreamland. She had left her windows flung open that night for it was humid, especially in a town called Mist, and had thought the wind might pick up later in the night. Fortunately for her, it did. That whiff of scent slowly trickled down into Rydia's dreamland, where she eventually recognized it for the smell of a wild rose, all the tang of a lemon and the softness of velvet wrapped into one smell. She sat straight up in bed, awakened almost instantly. The thought that had been niggling at her for days upon days, the sense of deja vu that had overcome her: she knew what they were about. She needed to begin a new garden. Maybe not the same flowers that her mother had planted, for those belonged to her mother, but new ones. Rydia had traveled plenty, and in those travels she had come across a variety of flowers that would be perfect for the mainly-cool, sometimes-hot climate she lived in.

She would travel one last time and collect those plants she wanted: blue dragon-weed flowers near Mysidia (not an actual weed, though it was a common misconception), the varied colors of chocobo daffodils (yellow, white edged with pink, and deep indigo), even some of the famed Baron roses (those, she felt, her mother wouldn't mind sharing) for which Rosa had been named.

And so she managed it with the help of old friends (Cid mainly, along with his airship, of course, him grumbling in the background like a fond uncle about how she was so presumptuous and how he was only doing this out of the kindness of his heart, thank you very much, you better appreciate this) and gathered all the types of flowers she wanted, then returned to her home town.

After coaxing her plantlings along for their first few years of life (not without a few scares of early frost!), she eventually had a beautiful garden. And when she found herself raising Cuore as her own daughter, she decided right then and there to pass on her mother's legacy, of the sacredness of life and the value of nurturing a seed until it became a mighty plant, capable of taking care of itself.

It's said that in the centuries that passed, the unbroken line of daughters that were born to the family cared so much for that garden and added to it so much that it eventually became famous in it's own right, besides having a creator that had helped save the world from the Great Evil, Zemus, but that's a tale for another time.


End file.
